When, in 1997, Bill Clinton used the line-item veto, which Congress had just given him, to cancel $200 million for New York state, Giuliani harried Clinton all the way to the Supreme Court.

The justices agreed with Giuliani that the line-item veto was an unconstitutional violation of the "presentment" clause.

Now, Giuliani says, he favors amending the Constitution to give presidents such a veto, thereby substantially augmenting what shouldn't be further augmented: presidential power.

In 1996, when a Republican-controlled Congress tried by statute to give Clinton and subsequent presidents a line-item veto, Pat Moynihan's intervention in the Senate debate began:

"I rise in the serene confidence that this measure is constitutionally doomed."

He was vindicated because the Constitution says "every bill" passed by Congress shall be "presented" to the president, who shall sign "it" or return "it" with his objections.

The antecedent of the pronoun is the bill, not bits of it.

Forty-three governors have the power to have something other than an all-or-nothing choice when presented with appropriations bills.

This didn't matter in 1789, when the only appropriations bill passed by the First Congress could have been typed double-space on a single sheet of paper.

President Reagan once displayed a 43-pound, 3,296-page bill as an argument for a line-item veto. Today's government routinely generates elephantine appropriations bills.

Were a president empowered to cancel provisions of legislation, he would be making, rather than executing, laws and the separation of powers would be violated.

When presidents truncated bills by removing items, they often would vitiate the will of Congress. Frequently, congressional majorities couldn't have been cobbled together for bills if they hadn't included provisions presidents later removed.

The line-item veto expresses liberalism's faith in top-down government that has produced today's inflated presidency.

Liberalism assumes executive branch experts, free from parochial constituencies, know, as members of Congress don't, what is good for the nation "as a whole." This is contrary to the public philosophy of James Madison's "extensive" republic with its many regions and interests.

If Romney thinks a line-item veto would be a major force for federal frugality, he is mistaken.

Then-Gov. Reagan used his line-item veto to trim only about 2 percent from California budgets. Much larger proportions of state budgets than of the federal budget are susceptible to such vetoes.

Sixty-one percent of the federal budget goes to entitlements and to interest payments on government borrowing, neither of which can be vetoed. Another 21 percent goes to defense and homeland security.

The line-item veto might result in increased spending. Legislators would have even less conscience about packing the budget with pork, because they could get credit for putting in what presidents would be responsible for taking out.

Presidents, however, might use the pork for bargaining, saying to individual legislators: If you support me on this and that, I won't veto the bike path you named for your Aunt Emma.

After a century of the growth of presidential power - and eight years of especially aggressive assertions of presidential prerogatives - it would be unseemly to intensify this tendency with a line-item veto.

Conservatives used to be the designated worriers about the evolution of the presidency into the engine of grandiose government.

They should visit the Rotunda for the Charters of Freedom in the National Archives building, where the Constitution is displayed under four large glass plates. Almost half of the glass is required to cover just Article One. That concerns the legislative branch, which is the government's "first branch" for a reason.

A polite assessment of Romney and Giuliani's enthusiasm for a line-item veto would resemble a 19th century scholar's assessment of a rival's translation of Plato: "The best translation of a Greek philosopher which has ever been executed by a person who understood neither philosophy nor Greek."

Will is a columnist for The Washington Post. His e-mail address is georgewill@washpost.com.

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